During the first screenings of Days Gone, a PS4-exclusive, open-world zombie shooter released this week, assembled critics were reportedly heard giggling at parts of the game’s dialogue.

Video game critics are not an audience known for their sensitivity towards cheesy scripts, and it is clear, from its outset, that Days Gone wants you to take its story seriously: so seriously, in fact, that one of the game’s trailers was simply entitled STORY TRAILER. It is a shame, then, that Days Gone's story is ludicrous, hackneyed and generally represents a step backwards in writing for gaming blockbusters.

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The game is set in apocalyptic Oregon, two years after a “zombie” viral outbreak. You play the scandalously-named Deacon St. John, or “Deek” for short, a gruff biker with a shady past, a potentially dead wife and a baseball cap that stays miraculously affixed backwards. Deek is, on the prevailing evidence, a horrible person. Early on, he tells a lady at gunpoint, "I don't shoot women unless I don't have a choice. Do I have a choice?" What a winsome fellow. How are we meant to relate to this psycho?

“Bro, bro I think he's dead!” splutters Deek’s companion, Boozer, as Deek melees a zombie’s head into jelly. These aren’t undead zombies, just infected people, so there’s some sense here that Deek is just wildly beating on very sick people.

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Deek’s biker vibe is also confounding. The press pack for Days Gone came packaged with a black-and-white, skull-and-crossbones durag, imprinted with the words “flyin’ high layin’ low”. Is a character who wears these kind of items unironically, and whose name suggests he might be a long-lost member of the Mötley Crüe, really a suitable fit for a po-faced story about redemption in the face of adversity? The game wants you to spend 60-plus hours with the kind of guys who sound like they watch Infowars.

As is typical of stories where protagonists have biceps instead of brains – see also Gears of War – the dialogue in Days Gone is bad. Really bad. “We've been through shit worse than this before!” says Bruiser, during the early throes of the apocalypse. Really, Bruiser – worse than total societal collapse?

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Between exposition as graceful as being battered by a two-by-four – “It's not your fault your wife’s dead!” – Deek and Bruiser mostly communicate through profanity, in the vein of “You hunting shit? Shit? Yeah shit!” The writers have confused the fact that some people may talk like this with the idea that people talking like this is interesting.

The story between Deek and his missing wife is not touching. At one point, during a flashback of their wedding, she makes him promise “to ride me as much as you ride your bike.” Beyond his aforementioned “old lady”, Deek eventually chaperones a young woman named Lisa (she reminds him of his wife's sister). It’s cliché to even note the cliché: women act here as both a justification for, and redemption from, being a jerk.

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But this lazy writing is ubiquitous throughout the game; indeed, it is fundamental to the entire genre within which Days Gone falls. For any video game designer, the attraction of zombies (or in some other games, Nazis, or Nazi zombies) is obvious: they solve the riddle of how to gamify slaughter without needing to provide some moralising plot conceit. (Conveniently, all the human enemies in Days Gone are also irredeemably repellent.)

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As with other bad disaster stories, as long as the central protagonist we follow remains safe and reunites with their daughter/dog/durag, we are expected to simply dismiss the death of everyone else, not to mention the total erasure of human culture, as background noise. This is why these kinds of stories often feature characters who seem to have no interest in people or culture, and for whom the apocalypse seems to provide some exhilarating relief from contemporary life.

This is a shame, because though there are gameplay problems with Days Gone – fall damage is indecipherable; the bike can handle like a lawnmower – the bits that have nothing to do with the story are breathless and fun. It’s extremely entertaining to push an abandoned car off the road as the infected bare down on you, or race away from the game’s various zombie types only to be clotheslined by a lamppost and summarily devoured. Those who can brave the story and make it further into the game are rewarded with full-on battles with justifiably-hyped zombie "hordes".

Game plots are often much worse than the action movies they ape, often because they take themselves so seriously. Yet there have been better zombie games than Days Gone – like Left 4 Dead, which did not take itself seriously, or The Last of Us, which did, but was better written.

Similarly, the recently Bafta winning God of War shows that blockbuster games that feature preposterous violence can still have affectingly-told, serious stories. The quality of game writing is moving towards parity with good film; in this sense, Days Gone feels like an anachronism.